KABUL (TCA) — U.S. Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on March 23 that he has seen evidence of increasing Russian efforts to influence the Taliban “and perhaps even to supply” the militant group, RFE/RL reported.
Scaparrotti, a four-star general who previously served as the director of the Joint Staff and the commander of U.S.-led international forces in Afghanistan, did not specify what types of supplies he thought Russia might be providing the Taliban.
Russian officials have denied providing aid to Taliban fighters.
Taliban officials have told Reuters they have had significant contacts with Moscow since at least 2007 but said Russian involvement did not extend beyond “moral and political support.”
In other news, local officials in Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand say Taliban fighters captured the strategic district of Sangin on March 23 without a shot being fired after government forces pulled out of the area, according to RFE/RL.
Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman, said the militant group captured the police headquarters and a military base overnight, seizing military equipment left behind by retreating government forces.
A spokesman for Helmand’s governor said Afghan forces made a “tactical withdrawal” from the district center to avoid civilian casualties.
Another Afghan official said U.S.-backed forces conducted air strikes in the district to destroy equipment left behind.
Sangin was the site of intense fighting for years after the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The district, which accounts for the bulk of Afghanistan’s opium production, is strategically placed between the Helmand River and neighboring Kandahar Province.
U.S. and NATO forces handed over responsibility for the security of Sangin to Afghan government forces in 2013.
According to U.S. estimates, the Afghan government now controls less than 60 percent of Afghanistan’s territory.
